I use a little program to do that: Shutdown. It has command line options to directly shutdown, restart and others.

I use win 2000 and use a shutdown window (made with shortcut2) with the different shutdown options. Similar to the one that uses winxp since I didn't like having to open the drop down menu to do different actions. It was much better with radio buttons like on win98 where you could simply double clic on the option to have it done.

I believe you could use something similiar with the aid of this program, and you wont loose the welcome screen.

Hope it helps.

PS: The program its a stand alone exe, no installation needed, no registry inputs neither.